The last few decades have seen an exponential increase in the worldwide use of pervasive devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), game players, embedded processors, laptop computers and desktop computers. There continue to be great advances in both technological capability and ubiquity which serve to facilitate increasingly universal communications. Furthermore, these pervasive devices increasingly have integrated capabilities beyond mere telecommunications or computing; for example, such devices nowadays are frequently integrated with internal clocks, GPS systems, and image/video capture systems.
Nonetheless, advances in early detection and notification of environmental conditions have not kept pace with the overall advances in communications technology. Indeed, there have been many well-documented instances of ineffective communication. Some of these have occurred during disasters both natural (for example, the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina) and man-made (for example, the September 11 terrorist attacks) which resulted in literally thousands of deaths which could likely have been avoided had more timely information been provided both to governmental authorities and to those within the zone of danger. Today's limited early detection systems (for example, seismographs or fire lookouts) are limited not only in density and coverage area, but also lack the ability to collect and collate multiple stimuli in order to obtain a more detailed picture of the surrounding environment. Furthermore, current warning systems tend to focus on advisories communicated via mass media, which frequently are both overbroad (causing people to assume these advisories are irrelevant and thus may be safely ignored) and underbroad (failing to reach the populations most directly endangered who may not be actively monitoring the broadcast media, for example, beachgoers during the Asian Tsunami and office workers on September 11). Notification regarding non-disaster conditions also could benefit from improvement; for example, “macro” weather reports used to predict whether it is a good day for the beach or for boating may not accurately reflect local conditions at a beach or boating region of interest.
It would thus be desirable to overcome the limitations in previous approaches.